Coaching A Winning Mindset | A Q&A with Jeremy Snape

We all want to achieve our personal best. Whether it's at work, on the field, or in the pursuit of a life-long dream, the key to getting there is most often conquering your mind.

International cricketer, coach and speaker, Jeremy Snape sat down with us to share how to sculpt a winning mindset to create lasting results in your business, and most importantly, within yourself.

From your cricketing career, to coaching people, to achieve a winning mindset, can you tell us a bit about your journey?

During my 19-year career as a professional and international cricketer, I always felt like the mindset element was the most pivotal to my performance. The strange thing was that no-one really spoke about it or coached it, so things like confidence, resilience and focus were just concepts which came and went. To me these were the biggest drivers of success, so we needed to be trained in the same way we honed our cricketing skills, but we weren’t.

So I did an MSc in psychology and then started to work with some of the best teams in the world. I wanted to find out what the world’s top stars and coaches were thinking and doing to be so successful. This led to roles with South African cricket, Premier League Football and England Rugby with Eddie Jones – now Mindset is a huge part of high-performance in both sport and business and I love helping people develop the mindset they need for success.

We were curious about sports stars and their confidence; how can we apply some of the strategies you coach in our own roles in business?

Confidence starts by being realistic about the challenge in front of you. Rather than getting emotional and catastrophising it, we should break things down into smaller chunks. Also, looking back at our past successes and strengths isn’t a common thing but this reflection is key as we can re-use those experiences in our future challenges.

Many of our goals are long term and can’t be achieved overnight. This means we need a clear plan of daily habits, routines and activities which, with discipline, allow us to see the progress we are making which builds our overall confidence. I think confidence is ‘preparedness’ so if you’ve put in the work, you’ll feel confident.

You mentioned that 'mistakes aren't dead-ends, just pivot points’. What was the experience that taught you that lesson?

Well, I’ve had so many failures - I failed my 11+ at school and channelled my disappointment into cricket, several years later I was awarded a sports scholarship at a brilliant school and that set me up for later success.

Equally as an England cricketer I made a mistake under pressure in front of 120,000 people and instead of feeling ashamed, I went and studied psychology so that I could understand how our brain works.

In any walk of life, we need to keep testing ourselves and we shouldn’t expect everything to be perfect, mistakes are all part of our continual improvement.

How can the way we think be optimised to achieve our personal best?

When we consider a new work deadline, challenge or role we can either think in a way that reinforces our belief that we can achieve it, or we start to protect ourselves by saying it’s impossible and staying in our comfort zone.

This is the negative voice in our head trying to keep us safe and doing what we’ve always done. The key is calculating the risk and then focusing on the processes, activities and building blocks which will help you to deliver a good performance.

The media and society are so focused on winning and losing that we worry about what people will think of us if it goes wrong. The key is staying focused on delivering excellence each day and the results should take care of themselves.

What is the one thing you find is always standing in the way of people’s success?

Fear of what other people think is a huge handbrake. The world has become obsessed by comparison and many of the social platforms show an unrealistic view of other people’s lives.

When was the last time people posted about their shameful mistakes, rainy days on holiday or times they let someone down? If we think the ‘outside’ world is perfect, sunny and full of laughter then we hesitate in taking a risk in case we are the ‘only one’ who fails.

The truth is, Champions fail every day but in that quest for excellence, they enjoy striving and scrapping through the challenges of each day and growing from their experiences.

If there was one message that you would want an audience to take away from your talk, what would it be?

Your mindset is the key to your success but how much time do we spend training it? I’ve interviewed over 100 world class achievers and experts and created a video library and toolkit that businesses all over the world can use to become happier, healthier and more successful.

I’ve seen the transformational effect of these simple psychological strategies on people’s mindset, behaviour, performance and reputation and I love sharing the honest stories of what it takes.

Finally, Jeremy what’s next for you?

I’ll continue my quest to find out what makes the most successful people in the world ‘tick’ and translating that into speeches, practical tools, and video resources that everyone can use and adopt in their own workplace.

For further information call us on   or email  info@speakerscorner.co.uk .

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